Well, I sent out my interview to Matt Haughey and have received a response.  Too bad that I didn't wait until after last night's class to do it, though.

I was thinking yesterday that interviewing people over the net isn't really such a bad thing.  After all, you send them email, and if they want to, they answer your questions.  As long as you don't say anything untrue about them, how can they complain?  Besides, this is just for a class project, so it's not going anywhere by my teacher.

However, it's not that easy.

It became clear in class last night that some more focused questions could probably have put me in a better writing position.  Now I have to cobble a direction together from my probative but scattered interview queries.  I think I may still be able to succeed, but I'm not as confident today as I was yesterday.

This is the benefit of having class three times a week - more exposure to your teacher to ask questions and more time to think about what you're doing.  Unfortunately, we only meet once a week for a few hours at a time.

On a related note, it turns out that my teacher is a necromancer.  He says that in writing, we can bring the dead back to life.  Reading this statement now doesn't seem all that amazing, but when he said it in class he seemed to emanate an evil glow, and I imagined a scene of him sitting in the dark at a desk with a quill, writing the dead back to life.  Really.

Also, he's trying to encourage our class to be provocative in our profiles, to the point of muckraking.  I don't know if I'm comfortable with that.  He himself distributed an article to us last night saying how celebrity profiles are no better than trashy tabloids.  That was one of the points he was trying to illustrate.  (The main one being about how all celebrity profiles are cliche.)  Then he goes on to demand "trash" on our profile subjects.

He wants us to be controversial.  I suppose that would make a profile interesting, but shouldn't that be the purview of tabloid reporters?  Is it the goal of this teacher, this university to create a generation of tabloid reporters?  Are those the skills required in today's workforce to get by?

I don't think I was the only one in class that felt distaste for this sentiment.

Anyway, I have an appointment with him in his office on Wednesday to discuss my profile.  Part of the course involves these scheduled, out-of-class appointments to discuss our writing.  I wonder how productive it will be now that I've botched the interview.

Also, I noted last night that he suggests I talk to my subject directly so that I can pick up inflection and body language.  But I think I'm ok with email because my paper will be about internet communication.  I'm going to craft my interviewee's thoughts into a profile discussing the nature of internet communication.  I think that may yet be provocative.

Hopefully the mud outside of the class building will have dried up by my next class, too.  There's no way to get there from where I park without either walking through mud or walking for miles around it.

So I add this article before work, where I have even more writing to do for the kSkin/Envision help, and I added an Abby movie last night.  It should be in the Abby section.  It's got Abby and a slide and I cut out the part where she falls on her face and I drop the camera and run over.  It's a touching tale of growing up in a world of plastic toys...  Ok, it's just a 4 minute movie.  But it has Abby in it, so it's all good.